Nell Tiger Free plays young novice Margaret, with Sonia Braga as Sister Silvia
GETTY, DISNEY
When director Arkasha Stevenson (Legion) was seven years old, her mum showed her The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen. Fast-forward a couple of decades and she found herself reading a screenplay that served as a prequel to the last of those aforementioned religious horror classics. And she was hooked.
‘What I really liked was that the script wasn’t trying to remake the Richard Donner movie,’ she says, namechecking the famous 1976 film that deals with the coming of the antichrist. ‘I don’t think you can touch that movie. It was presented like a drama – horrible things happening to real people. This script, you fall in love with this one woman, as just awful things happen to her.’